Even at the End of the Earth: Ruth Behar on Memory, Storytelling, and Child Migration

“Even at the end of the earth, I will remember where I came from.”
– Ruth Behar, Across So Many Seas 

This statement from the novel Across So Many Seas determines the direction of creativity and study interests of the renowned writer and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar whose narratives I examine in my doctoral dissertation “The Works of Fiction by Ruth Behar: Jewish Child Migration, Cultural Memory, and Family Lore of Latin American Women Writers.” A professor at the University of Michigan and winner of prestigious literary and academic awards such as the Pura Belpré award, Ruth Behar focuses on concepts of migration, displacement, diaspora, home and homesickness, memory, and more in her works (LSA Anthropology, University of Michigan, n.d.).

The story of Behar’s family influenced her development as a writer and researcher. She was born in Havana, Cuba, into a family of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews (Behar, 2013, p. 21). Her maternal grandparents emigrated from Eastern Europe and her paternal grandparents from Turkey. They arrived to Cuba in search of new beginnings in the 1920s (Behar, 2024, p. 237) but were forced to leave the country for the United States to seek a new refuge following the Cuban Revolution of 1959 (Behar, 2013, p. 22). Ruth Behar was a child then.

Behar’s passion for learning about the history and culture of her ancestors and the desire to share her experiences resulted in her memoirs and numerous articles. I was first introduced to Ruth Behar’s works through her autobiographical study Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in between Journeys, which impressed me so much that I decided to devote my scholarly focus to her works. This collection of essays is dedicated to various stages of the author’s life: her childhood in Cuba and immigration to the US, family relationships and stories connecting generations, and the search for roots and the bringing together of people who share the same Sephardic surname around the world.

The quest for a lost homeland and a sense of belonging that drive Ruth Behar continues in a joint project with photographer Humberto Mayol: An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba. This book is dedicated to Behar’s trips to Cuba following the island’s long period of isolation. She not only shares her family history and childhood memories of Cuba, comparing them to the time when the country opened up to American visitors, but also seeks out Jewish communities and collects personal stories of Jews who remained in Cuba throughout those years. Both books are imbued with a sense of nostalgia and the author’s deep connection to her ancestry.

Photo Credit: Nadezhda Bezuevskaia

Later, Ruth Behar continues exploring her family’s history in the context of migration, but shifting to a new genre: children’s and middle-grade literature. Her first novel, Lucky Broken Girl (2017), is based on the author’s personal immigration story to the United States and subsequent traumatic experience and recovery from a car accident. In this novel, a young protagonist Ruthie shows powers of fortitude and bravery in the face of the consequences of tragic events. She begins to perceive herself and the people around her differently, fostering compassion, forgiveness, and hope as she lays bedridden in a body cast for a year.

In her next book, Letters from Cuba (2020), Ruth Behar continues her cultural-anthropological exploration of Jewish Cuba, inspired by the life and immigration story of her Ashkenazi maternal grandmother Esther. Her fictional young namesake embarks on a daring sea voyage from Poland to Cuba alone to help her father earn money for ship tickets to bring the whole family to the island as the threat of the Holocaust looms over Europe. Through Esther’s letters to her sister Malka, her optimistic mindset, inventiveness, and perseverance, the author exemplifies a post-traumatic creative healing method and showcases the young heroine’s way of overcoming the challenges of migration and displacement that can provide comfort to those readers who find themselves in similar circumstances.

Across So Many Seas (2024) is Ruth Behar’s third middle-grade novel. In this book, the author investigates the mysteries of a Sephardic journey by transporting four main characters across different eras: from Spain in 1492 to Turkey in 1923, to Cuba in 1961, and to the United States and Spain in 2003. Inspired by those nuggets of her Sephardic grandmother’s life story, Behar reconstructs the history of the Jewish people’s migration through key historical milestones, such as the Cuban Revolution or the change of political regime in Turkey, while tracing the narrative back to the beginnings of the Sephardic exodus from Spain in the late Middle Ages. Behar sees difference in the international recognition of the crucial date for the humankind:

“Most people know about the 1492 associated with Columbus and the conquest of Americas. But few know about this other 1492. For Sephardic Jews, this 1492 is associated with the pain and grief of losing a homeland. That homeland meant so much they continued speaking Spanish, the language of those who expelled them and turned them into wanderers across so many seas” (Behar, 2024, p. 239).

Ruth Behar at the American Anthropology Meetings in San Francisco (2012). Photo Credit: Monroem (CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Ruth Behar has created a work of historical fiction based on the migration experience of Sephardic Jews – a story little known on a global scale. The novel is imbued with lyricism and longing for home, finding expression in the melancholy of folk melodies and songs in the Ladino language that unite the four female protagonists across generations (Behar, 2024, 240).

My study examines how the middle-grade novels by Ruth Behar reflect Jewish child migration within Latin American women’s literature, exploring themes of displacement, cultural memory, and intergenerational narratives. My research uses an in-depth comparative literary analysis of Ruth Behar’s middle-grade novels, supplemented by related works by Jewish Latin American writers of Jewish descent, such as Margo Glantz, Ana María Shua, Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Rosa Nissán, Myriam Moscona, and others.

In her book Las Genealogías (The Family Tree), Margo Glantz traces the journey of her Ashkenazi parents from Eastern Europe to Mexico in the early 1920s (Glanz, 1996, p. 62), thus echoing Ruth Behar’s investigation on her family’s migration journey. Ana María Shua’s novel El Libro de los Recuerdos (The Book of Memories) resonates with these works. It is based on the story of the immigration to Argentina of her relatives and acquaintances, who serve as prototypes for the composite characters in her book. In her pseudo-memoir Castillos en la tierra, Angelina Muñiz-Huberman recounts the experience of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, the loss of loved ones, and the family’s exile and subsequent adaptation to a new life in Latin America through the eyes of her young protagonist, Alberina. Moreover, Mexican writers Rosa Nissán (Novia que te vea) and Myriam Moscona (Tela de sevoya) join Ruth Behar in exploring family history and the lives of second-generation Sephardic young girls and women, infusing their texts with the Ladino language.

The themes of child migration and family memory are particularly relevant today, as global instability forces people to relocate and seek a new home. Such an experience is especially difficult for children who find themselves in a new cultural and linguistic reality. In the interview to Marjorie Agosín, Ruth Behar comments on this: “While we can’t hide the horrible events of history from young readers, it’s important to also offer hope and remind them that there is goodness in the world” (Behar & Agosín, 2023). Lucky Broken Girl, Letters from Cuba, and Across So Many Seas convey a humanistic message, offering support to those facing similar trials by sharing examples of their female protagonists’ migration experiences. The novels under study trace family lineages and immigration trajectories within a broad historical and socio-cultural context, collectively lending a more vivid and expressive quality to the voices of women in contemporary Latin American literature.

References:

• Behar, Ruth. (2024). Across So Many Seas. Nancy Paulsen Books.
• Behar, Ruth. (2007). An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba (H. Mayol, Photographer). Rutgers University Press.
• Behar, Ruth. (2020). Letters from Cuba. Nancy Paulsen Books.
• Behar, Ruth. (2017). Lucky Broken Girl. Nancy Paulsen Books.
• Behar, Ruth. (2013). Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in between Journeys. Duke University Press.
• Behar, Ruth, & Agosín, Marjorie. (2023, June 19). The Languages of Belonging: A Conversation Between Ruth Behar and Marjorie Agosín. Jewish Book Council. https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/pb-daily/the-languages-of-belonging-a-conversation-between-ruth-behar-and-marjorie-agosin
• Glantz, Margo. (1997). Las Genealogías. Aguilar, Altea, Taurus, Alfaguara, S.A. de C.V.
• LSA Anthropology, University of Michigan. (n.d.). Ruth Behar. https://lsa.umich.edu/anthro/people/faculty/socio-cultural-faculty/rbehar.html
• Moscona, Myriam. (2014). Tela de sevoya. Acantilado Cuaderns Crema, S. A. U.
• Muñiz-Huberman, Angelina. (1995) Castillos en la tierra (Seudomemorias). Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Dirección General de Publicaciones, Ediciones del Equilibrista.
• Nissán, Rosa. (2019). Novia que te vea. Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S.A. de C.V.
• Shua, Ana María. (1998). The Book of Memories. University of New Mexico Press.

***

Nadezhda Bezuevskaia is a doctoral candidate in Jewish Studies at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien (HfJS) and Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies (HCIAS). She specializes in Jewish and Latin American literature with a particular focus on the theme of Jewish child migration in the works of Ruth Behar and Latin American women writers.

Nadezhda Bezuevskaia

View all posts

The text only may be used under licence Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.